Breaking News! Great Bardfield Symposium Coming Soon!

Apologies for the poor reproduction if this rather fine brochure, but it's the best I could do with my limited technical know-how. If you want a proper one, please contact the Fry...

The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden

Edward Bawden, February 2pm, 1936, private collection/estate of Edward Bawden

It seems amazing that seven years have passed since Tim Mainstone of The Mainstone Press commissioned me to track down the shops portrayed by Eric Ravilious in his remarkable 1938 book 'High Street'. I spent one memorable day racing around London, armed with a folder of pictures and an annotated A-Z, trying to visit a dozen or more sites before dark, and another with Tim exploring the Hedinghams in the pouring rain.

Writing about art and artists is always enjoyable, but there's nothing quite like a quest. Come to think of it, all of the books I've written have involved at least an element of sleuthing. Finding locations is always fun, but so is teasing out a new influence or connection. Top of the list, though, is discovering a painting. When JS Auctions sent me a photo of the Ravilious watercolour 'Aldeburgh Bathing Machines' it hardly seemed possible that such a beautiful painting had been hidden away for so long.

Although it was the Ravilious that made the money in last Saturday's auction, Tim and I were equally excited by the discovery of a second painting that had not been seen for many years, Edward Bawden's watercolour showing the back of Brick House, Great Bardfield, and entitled 'February, 2pm'.

The auctioneers kindly took the time to show me both paintings last week, and while the Ravilious was, as Anne Ullmann put it, 'an absolute corker', the Bawden was full of surprises. I knew that he liked to work on non-absorbent paper so that he could scratch into the paint, but I had never seen the results of this approach up close. It looked as though Jackson Pollock had lent a hand with a welter of scratch marks, pencil scrawl and jagged stabs of pastel.

Which makes our new Mainstone Press quest that much more exciting. The art world has rather forgotten that in the 1930s Edward Bawden was renowned not only as a talented illustrator and designer but also as a watercolourist of great skill and daring. Exhibitions at the Zwemmer Gallery in 1933 and Leicester Galleries in 1938 were well received by critics and buyers alike, and it was this commercial success that now makes the paintings so hard to find.

Many of the pictures disappeared into private collections and have rarely, if ever, been seen since. And the task of locating them is made rather more difficult by the fact that the 1933 paintings were given lines of poetry for titles - often cleverly apt lines, but too wordy for everyday use. Often the watercolours were given more straightforward titles by owners or dealers, so it is not easy to work out which is which.

However, the quest is going well, and a number of fascinating, often lovely and always inventive pictures have come to light. We'll be putting a book together in due course, so if anyone can help us find more of these pre-war Bawden watercolours, do get in touch with me or with The Mainstone Press.

MAY 2015 UPDATE I'm now working on the book. Meanwhile, new paintings continue to come to light, and my opinion of Bawden-the-watercolourist just keeps going up. His 1938 Leicester Galleries exhibition must have been one of the events of the year, judging by the twenty-something pictures that Tim has located. The paintings of Newhaven, in particular, are startlingly fresh and original.

DEC 2015 UPDATE The book is now in production!

Small is Beautiful: Kettle's Yard and the Fry

'Von Ribbentrop in St Ives' at Kettle's Yard

Thank you to everyone who came to my Ravilious talk in Saffron Walden on Wednesday, and to the organisers - Nigel and Iris Weaver and staff at the Fry Art Gallery. I was just reading a post by Jonathan Jones about cuts at Tate Liverpool and it made me appreciate all the more the virtues of small, quirky galleries. I feel the same about bookshops, but we'll come back to them another day...

I had to go to Cambridge en route to Essex and, while there, braved the bikes and crowds of French schoolkids muddling about in the road to visit Kettle's Yard. I hadn't been for years and had completely forgotten that the permanent collection lives not in the gallery but in the house itself, the former home of Tate curator and collector Jim Ede and his wife Helen.

Having worked at the Tate during the 1920s and 1930s, Jim amassed a diverse collection of British art from the period, and in 1966 he donated house and contents to Cambridge University. His vision was to create not 'an art gallery or museum, nor ... simply a collection of works of art reflecting my taste or the taste of a given period.'

HS 'Jim' Ede at Kettle's Yard

Christopher Wood, Jean Bourgoint, 1926

Instead he sought to preserve 'a continuing way of life from these last fifty years, in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture, in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability.'

At a time when exhibitions tend to be dominated by great walls of explanatory text, it is a pleasure indeed to wander around this eccentric dwelling, looking at paintings in a domestic context and, quite naturally, unlabelled. With interest in 20th century British art on the rise, I can think of few better places to see work by Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Winifred Nicholson, David Jones, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Christopher Wood and others, alongside work by modern European artists. The selection is eclectic, reflecting not the depth of Ede's wallet but the warmth of his friendships. The paintings, sculptures and other objects BELONG in the house and are all the more enjoyable for that.

Kettle's Yard interior

The strangeness of the experience is heightened by the fact that you have to ring a doorbell for admission, much as if you were popping round to visit a friend; the staff are helpful but you can't get hold of a guidebook (which has a numbered plan of all the art) until you've been all the way round. When I was there a woman was trying to buy a guidebook but had given up her handbag, as requested, at the front door. You'll have to go and get it, she was told firmly - NOT the handbag, JUST the purse.

From there it's a half-hour drive to Saffron Walden and the Fry Art Gallery, where 'Ravilious in Essex' is entering its final month - 4000 visitors and counting. The Fry was also established by public-minded collectors, a succession of them in fact, going back more than a century - it takes its name from a scion of the Bristol family of chocolate makers who owned it in the 19th century. Nigel and Iris Weaver discovered the place in a ruinous condition when they moved to Saffron Walden in the 1980s, restored it and in 1987 opened the building to the public once again. Like Tate Britain in miniature, it is a gorgeous building with a fascinating permanent collection.

With a focus on the artists of Great Bardfield (John Aldridge, Edward Bawden, Tirzah Garwood/Ravilious, Kenneth Rowntree...), the Fry has become the principal port of call for admirers of Eric Ravilious, who lived in north-west Essex for the last eleven years of his life. Paintings, lithographs, Wedgwood china and wood engravings are beautifully presented, with a collection of the artist's wood blocks a particular treat.

David Oelman at the Fry... now those books look familiar!

Both Kettle's Yard and the Fry have mildly eccentric opening hours, so do check before you set out. I was just too early for the Kettle's Yard show 'Von Ribbentrop in St Ives', which opens on July 16th. 'Ravilious in Essex' runs until August 14.

Ravilious in Essex - the Map

I've started putting together a Google map of interesting locations mentioned in or connected to 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life'. What next - an app?! I thought I might be able to put the map itself here but it's a bit beyond my technical skills, so you can find it here.

Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life

Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life is the third in a series of books celebrating the life and work of Eric Ravilious (1903‐42). In 1932 Ravilious and his wife Tirzah moved to the Essex village of Great Bardfield, and for the remaining decade of his life they lived within an easy cycle ride of the village, first in Castle Hedingham and then at Ironbridge Farm, near Shalford. It was in north-west Essex that his children were born, and it was here that he found the inspiration for a series of watercolours that together form a remarkable portrait of country life in the 1930s.

Ravilious sought out both the beautiful and the unusual, and the twenty-two watercolours in this volume provide a unique record of village life that includes everything from the splendid Georgian architecture of the Castle Hedingham vicarage to abandoned steam engines and other relics of the past. Each picture is accompanied by an essay which explores the places depicted and introduces characters and stories hidden behind the scenes. 

Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life shows a fine English artist at home, among friends and family, enjoying the pleasures and enduring the trials of village life in the 1930s. The book is a companion volume to Sussex and the Downs (2009) and The War Paintings (2010); taken together, the three books form an unusual and compelling biography of Ravilious, drawing on his correspondence, original research and other sources to create an intimate portrait of the artist and his world,

Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life will be published by The Mainstone Press in April 2011.

Reviews for Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs

‘Beautiful’ (Stella magazine, Sunday Telegraph, Dec 2009)

‘Ravilious’s watercolour landscapes of the South Downs … are beautifully reproduced here alongside insightful essays…’ (London Review of Books, Jan 2010)

‘The next volume from Mainstone Press is eagerly awaited.’ (Sarah Drury, The Art Book, Aug 2010)
‘James Russell’s writing has the clarity and concision of the paintings, and is both properly informative and enjoyably readable... Glorious.’ (Andrew Lambirth, The Art Newspaper, Sept 2010)

Reviews for Ravilious in Pictures: The War Paintings

‘A vivid portrait of the artist’ (Country Life magazine, Dec 2010)

‘A lovely and melancholy new volume’ (Ian Collins, Eastern Daily Press, Dec 2010)

‘Fantastic’ (Emily Rhodes, The Spectator Arts Blog, Dec 2010)

Tirzah Ravilious and the Women of Bardfield

Tirzah Garwood, The Wife, 1929

 People who have delved a bit into the world of Eric Ravilious may know that his wife Tirzah, nee Garwood, not only tweaked one or two of his best-known paintings but was also a fine artist in her own right, and an excellent printmaker.

The range and energy of her work is impressive, particularly given that she abandoned printmaking after marrying Eric and devoted herself with great dedication to her children. Despite being widowed and fighting cancer she produced (and sold) marbled papers, paintings and relief works in paper.

She shared - and no doubt fuelled - Eric's fascination for toys and dollhouses, creating haunting interiors. She also shared the fate of many female artists, that of being overlooked by people fascinated by her famous husband's work.


The imminent publication of her diaries should shift the balance a little, since she was an outspoken, observant and energetic writer. So too will the exhibition currently showing at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden, which features:

wood engravings, box constructions and paintings by Tirzah Ravilious, oils paintings and pots by Charlotte Bawden, and remarkable marbled papers by both artists, often working together at the kitchen table.

Sheila Robinson invented the cardboard cut and there are a number of these together with an unpublished book Seven Dancing Princesses. Lucy, the first wife of John Aldridge, was a rag rug maker and one of her pieces is on show together with a portrait of her at her work. Marianne Straub had a distinguished career in woven textiles and there are examples on display. Many people will have sat on her work while riding on London Transport's buses or Underground trains.